Is Digital Humanities a Collaborative Discipline?
Joint-Authorship Publication Patterns Clash with Defining Narrative
Julianne Nyhan and Oliver Duke-Williams
The London School of Economics and Political Science
The Impact Blog

“As an emerging discipline still defining itself, Digital Humanities offers
an ideal opportunity to reflect on its broader disciplinary narratives.
Julianne Nyhan and Oliver Duke-Williams examined its collaborative nature
through the lens of publication patterns in some of its core journals.
They found predominately single-authored papers were published during the
time-frames, suggesting individual scholarship is still playing a large
role. But this may be a case where publication and assessment havent yet
caught up with wider disciplinary practice.

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Collaboration is widely considered to be both synonymous with and
essential to Digital Humanities (DH). This is because one person can
rarely possess all of the (inter)disciplinary and technical knowledge
needed to implement many DH projects.

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In DH research literature, in grey literature and on scholarly blogs the
collaborative nature of DH is often evidenced by reference to the joint
and multi-authored publications that are seen as characteristic of the
field.”

“In the past decade, digital scholarship has gone from being a quirky
corner of the humanities to a mainstream phenomenon, restructuring
funding landscapes and pushing tenure committees to develop new
protocols for accrediting digital projects. As the stakes have grown,
so has an expectation about the role that the “digital turn” might play
in revivifying the humanities, effecting a synthesis with the sciences,
and other weighty causes. For many of its champions, the tinkering
character of the digital humanities represents a kind of artisanal
inquisitiveness, a hands-on, tool-building, map-making ethos that
chafes against more abstract modes of humanistic inquiry.”